At 04:05 AM 1/3/01 -0500, you wrote:
>And even so, even aside from the omission itself, the assumption of the
>future's culture having roughly the same sexual norms as ours is biased in
>another way; toward simplistic futurism that fails to imagine really
>significant change in many aspects of culture. ST has always felt to me like
>the Twentieth Century in futuristic drag, though. So that's not a great
>surprise either. The bias isn't so much *against* homosexuality as it is
>*toward* one (!) version of normative twentieth century western sexuality
-- a
>fairly conservative one, at that.
I don't buy this at all........ there is an awful lot of sleeping around
on Star Trek. Premarital sex is virtually accepted. Abortion is
completely accepted. Sleeping with co-workers is completely accepted.
All of these represent significant changes.
>>(This is especial true
>>if you discount the original series where even if a homosexual relationship
>>was written, it would certainly never be aired.)
>
>Do you see how you just contradicted yourself, John? This, of course, means
>that those early shows are *necessarily* biased, because homosexuality was
>implicitly expected to be a taboo topic and was treated as such by all
>involved. If that's not bias, I don't know what is... and I say that knowing
>full well how groundbreaking it apparently was in other areas, such as in
the
>multiracial crew (of course, led by a nice oversexed white male jock, but we
>can't expect too much, can we?). But implicit taboo = necessary bias.
I draw a finer distinction. It is *possible* (without further evidence)
that the early Star Trek did contain homosexuality, but it was simply
edited out. So yes, there is bias, but I believe we were focused on
determining if there was bias from the show's Creators, not necessarily the
TV suits.
Josh Bell wrote:
>TNG:
> Jean-Luc Picard
> William T. Riker
> Beverly Crusher
> Data
> Deanna Troi
> Geordi LaForge
> Worf
>
>DS9:
> Benjamin Sisko
> Kira Nerys
> Jadzia / Ezri Dax
> Julian Bashir
> Miles O'Brien
> Odo
> Quark
>
>VOY:
> Kathryn Janeway
> Chakotay
> B'Elanna Torres
> Tom Paris
> Neelix
> The Doctor
> Tuvok
> Seven of Nine
> Harry Kim
Each of these lists has less than 9 charachters (if you don't count the
Doctor, which I don't) which means that the absence of homosexual is not,
by itself, unusual.
JDG
_______________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - ICQ #3527685
